A car that doesn’t crash. A vehicle which has the ability to dodge a potential hazard without the driver lifting a finger. A nice warm cosy feeling that you are not in any danger of dying in a road accident.

A fantasy straight from a science fiction? Or an achievable goal within a decade?

Now, one manufacturer has set itself the aim of building an ‘uncrashable car’ by 2020, building on its already immaculate safety record, according to the Telegraph.

It has to be Volvo, of course – the cars that are thought to be so safe they may as well have ‘I’m officially a responsible adult’ flashing in neon above them.

Some think they’re even a tad boring but there’s nothing boring about Volvo’s ambitions.

“Our aim is to build cars that do not crash,” Jan Ivarsson, the company’s safety strategy chief, told the Telegraph. “By 2020 no one should be killed or even moderately injured in a Volvo.”

The company, which has its own accident research team to improve safety features in its own cars, is now studying a range of technologies to help it towards its end goal.

These include a driver behaviour study, road trains (groups of cars locked together to reduce fuel consumption and improve safety), collision avoidance, and augmented vision.

Very clever stuff, we will follow this story with great interest as it unfolds over the next ten years. We can’t help but think of the idea of technology taking control as quite scary, but admittedly not as scary as the idea of a fatal car wreck, which – looking at estimates from the World Health Organisation claiming 1.2 million people are killed in road accidents every year – is all too common.